Window Managers
 

I've been futzing about lately with lightweight WMs: xfce, fluxbox, blackbox, enlightment etc. Mostly on OpenBSD as not everything is immediately available in a nice .tgz format for Slackware, and linuxpackages.net seemed to be down yesterday (anyone know why?). Regardless, I read a review this afternoon linked off of www.linuxtoday.com about a wm called Ion. I can't get to the project homepage via SF right now, but has anyone tried it? Also, any other recomendations for lightweight WMs that aren't normally included with distros.

Cheers,

Finegan

I got to the homepage through LinuxToday... a link at the bottom of the 1st page of the article. I'm downloading it now, so I'll let you know how I get on with it.

Wow... you know, I bet with the article being picked up by LinuxToday that we've slashdotted the poor guy... hehe.

Cheers,

Finegan

Just tried it. It seems to be quite similar to something that I used before... and didn't like! Although the auto-framing thing is quite a logical idea if you're going to be using fullscreen (text) apps, it doesn't work if you're going to use graphical things, and since you'll need to be running X (a graphical interface), it doesn't seem like too much of a step forward, imo!

Just compare:
Sawfish screen
Ion screen 1
Ion screen 2

Okay, I see what you mean, yeah that just seems to be a big bag of suck. Any other recomendations for oddball wms?

Oh, I like the hostname too.

Cheers,

Finegan

liked ion but...
 

I loved using Ion since I hate resizing windows by hand.

I also have popups and dialogue boxes, all this just bugs me.

Thing is with Ion - programs aren't used to it. I edited the keyboard binds so I could use it with my left hand and keep the other on the mouse. Even though you can get use to Ion (you can use the mouse to move the position of programs) programs like the Gimp may present future problems unless the developer of Ion decides to implement normal window manager features.

So to get the same effect I did this:-

Install IceWM, simply because it can Tile Windows.

I then set:

F12 to toggle_maximise
F11 to tile Windows Vertically
Ctrl+Enter to New Terminal
Alt+C to close window
Alt+x to Execute new program

I now don't need a mouse or a menu but can use them if I like.
I use gmrun to launch programs along with xbindkeys as a hotkeys daemon.

You can also use your some multimedia keyboard keys for this, I think using a daemon called hotkeys.

Nice. But I now can't stand using any other setup :p

Other window managers I've looked at (I've tried sooo many):-

SELECTWM <-- reccommended, I use this to launch quake3 and avoid a window manager altogether.

LarsWM, PWM, fluxbox, evilWM, treeWM

ASFiles enlightenment oroborus
WindowMaker waimea
afterstep ion-devel pwm xfce
asapm flwm lwm sawfish
asclock fvwm metacity
blackbox gnustep openbox :p

icewm
 

I use icewm (http://www.icewm.org) its lightweight, real fast, completely skinable and is completely gnome compliant, with partial KDE compliance.

I use Sawfish normally, but I always try out new ones that look interesting. I tried something called Waimaiea (or something) which was quite unusual. You know the way that you can have a 'virtual desktop' that is considerably larger than your monitor resolution... it's annoying, isn't it? Well, Waimaiea (?) does something very similar by default, but it isn't half as annoying. With the oversized desktop you move around by hitting the cursor to the edge of the screen, whereas in Waimaiea you need to actually drag the desktop around. I also came across something called TreeWM that had an interesting philosophy: rather than having 4 virtual desktops (as in KDE/Gnome/SF/most others) and having to explicitly tell it to create more, you can create more virtual desktops within the original ones. Sort of having a 'Pager' in view on every desktop that has subdesktops, and accessing them like that... I never got it to work, but I can't say that I tried very hard, but the concept sounds interesting.

Oh, and I also read about some WMs that have circular, rotary menus (as opposed to the static, linear menus of KDE/Gnome/Any-others) that were accessed by clicking and holding the menu button on the desktop, and then moving the mouse around to rotate the menu and go through submenus.

Happy hunting.